Sunday Supplement - The Scientist

I am a bit of a worrier, and cycling time is when tend to mull over whatever are my worries of the day.  Happily, I am currently in a lull where the big worries are either behind me or too far ahead to catch my attention, so I have spare thinking time to apply to advancing humankind.  The other day I was spinning my legs and thinking what an amazingly efficient machine a bloke on a bike is.  But then I thought "ahh, but is he?".

A grown man (for simplicity we will put me in that category) burns about 4500 calories on a full day of cycling with some hills.  The fuel for this (based on a vaguely 'normal' diet) costs about £7.  In scientific papers it is important to expose your calculations to peer scrutiny so:  the weekly shop for Mrs Wesson and I comes to about £100.  Some of that goes on toilet paper, haemorrhoid ointment and other non-essentials but let's say about £5 per person per day for food.  That is for a normal rate of calorie burn so throw in another £2/day for some cycling flapjack. 

£7 per day....doesn't sound too bad but what are the alternatives?

Petrol delivers about 4500 calories from half a litre which costs about 70p.  Half of that is tax and, if we are using petrol as food, it shouldn't be taxed so call it 35p.  It should be easy to down 500cc of petrol in a couple of minutes, saving all the time currently spent cooking, eating and washing up.

So, a food powered human is 20 times less cost efficient than a petrol powered one!

Obviously, there is some genetic engineering needed to adapt humans to burn petrol as a fuel but I'll leave those details to lesser minds.  I DO see a few obvious problems that need some work:

1/ Petrol doesn't taste very nice.  They will have to find a way of making flavoured versions....strawberry would be nice.

2/ Restaurants, grocery stores, chip shops etc will all be out of business.  On the plus side, we will need a lot more petrol stations.

3/ They will probably have to outlaw lighting farts...this is already a risky business but practically suicidal in petrol powered humans.

Of course, any really calorie dense fuel offers possibilities. Pure alcohol, for example, would be nearly as good (about a bottle per day) and a hell of a lot more fun.

I then wondered about single malt whiskey, but it seems you would need about 2.5 bottles which, at £75 plus, has rather drifted away from my original objective of cost efficiency.

Neil suggested porridge, which certainly delivers inexpensive calories, but asking people to eat 20 bowls of porridge per day is never going to fly.

I suppose these days we must also consider a green fuel.  Leaving aside the obvious technical issues with running people on electricity we would need a 35kg battery pack to deliver 4500 calories.  That is double the weight of my panniers and I can tell you now, if my panniers weighed over 50kg I would need a heck of a lot more than 4500 calories a day.

I expect it will be a while before my ideas gain traction but hopefully I'll get my Nobel Prize before Donald.